Hernandez had 42.98 percent of the vote, while TV star Salvador Nasralla had 41.39 percent, with 99.96 percent of votes tallied, according to the tribunal’s website.
. . .
After the count suddenly halted for more than a day, the sporadic vote count started leaning in favor of the incumbent.

If Mr. Hernández is ratified as the victor, it would be a major setback for Mr. Zelaya and his wife, who had formed the Libre party as a protest vote against the country’s traditional politics, dominated for decades by two political parties, the conservative National Party and the center-right Liberal Party.

The Obama administration tried to force Honduras to violate its constitution and restore Mr. Zelaya to power. All of the country’s institutions refused.

That crisis remains a rare moment in Central American history when a U.S. president joined Fidel Castro and his allies in an effort to strong-arm three legitimate branches of a friendly government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even stripped the members of the Honduras Supreme Court of their U.S. visas. Just as rare, the rule of law prevailed.

Yet the bullying by Washington took its toll. The newly elected president, Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, was keenly aware that Honduras was out of favor with the U.S. and other left-wing governments in the region. He set about to placate them. One of his most controversial decisions was to grant amnesty to Mr. Zelaya, who ought to have been tried for his high crimes and misdemeanors.

When the world last heard from Honduras in 2009, the country had sparked a regional crisis after deposing its president, Manuel Zelaya, for his repeated illegal attempts to rewrite the Honduran Constitution as his amigo, the now-deceased autocrat Hugo Chavez, had done in Venezuela. Despite the fact that the Law Library of the U.S. Congress later found the process to be constitutional, theObama administration joined Chavez and other radical regimes in branding Mr. Zelaya’s removal a “military coup” and unleashed punitive sanctions on one of the region’s poorest countries.

Honduras survived that assault, but not before enduring such affronts to its sovereignty as Mr. Zelaya buzzing the airport in Tegucigalpa on a plane with Organization of American States Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza after being denied landing rights, and then Mr. Zelaya sneaking back into the country and finding refuge in the Brazilian Embassy, where he lined his room with tinfoil because he said Israeli agents were beaming microwaves at him.

Incredibly, Mr. Zelaya is poised to return to power in Honduras next month in the person of his wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, a candidate in presidential elections to be held Nov. 24. Ms. Castro, who has never held elected office, currently leads the polls in a three-way race, although with just under 30 percent support.

Over in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro fell off his bike. The clueless anchorwoman went on reading the scripted propaganda as if nothing had happened. She probably didn’t even have a livefeed for the event, demonstrating it’s all about the narrative,

Lacking nuclear fuel and without the primary components installed, the plant sat in limbo until December 2000, when Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Cuba. Putin offered Fidel Castro a belated $800 million to finish the first reactor. Despite Cuba’s reliance on imported oil for power, Castro declined. Project status: officially abandoned.

NOTHING brings together domestic foes like an external enemy. So when President Juan Manuel Santos announced that Colombia would not heed a ruling last November by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague that granted 70,000 sq km (27,000 square miles) of the Caribbean Sea that Colombians have considered their own since 1928 to Nicaragua, even his harshest critics applauded.

Former President Manuel Zelaya is expected to return to Honduras within a month, ending an exile that began nearly two years ago when he was ousted in a coup, an aide and a key supporter said Wednesday.

Conditions are right for Mr. Zelaya to return from the Dominican Republic after the Honduran Supreme Court dropped corruption charges against him, said Rasel Tomé, a senior aide of the former president.
…
Mr. Zelaya’s return could pave the way for Honduras to be reincorporated into the Organization of American States, which suspended the country after the coup in June 2009.

The United States and many other countries in the hemisphere have long since restored diplomatic ties with Honduras, but some nations, including Venezuela and Brazil, have declined to do so.

Americas: In the Americas, 17 countries (49 percent) were rated Free, 14 (40 percent) were rated Partly Free, and 4 (11 percent) were rated Not Free for 2010. The region’s population is almost evenly split between those living in Free (41 percent) and Partly Free (42 percent) media environments, with the remaining 17 percent living in Not Free countries. These figures are significantly influenced by the open media environments of the Caribbean, which tend to offset the less rosy picture in Central and South America. There were two negative status changes, with Honduras and Mexico joining the ranks of Not Free countries, as well as a number of significant numerical declines. Not since 2006 have so many countries in the region been designated Not Free. The regional average score worsened compared with 2009, with the bulk of the decline occurring in the political and economic categories.
Press freedom conditions remain extremely restricted in Cuba, which has one of the most repressive media environments worldwide, and Venezuela, where the government of President Hugo Chávez continued its efforts to control the press. Further pressures were placed on independent V enezuelan broadcast outlets during the year, including the revocation of licenses, and the head of a major television station, Globovisión, fled into exile.
Ongoing deterioration in Mexico and Honduras tipped both countries into the Not Free range in 2010. Mexico’s score worsened from 60 to 62 due to the country’s escalating drug wars, which have taken their toll on journalists. Violence and intimidation by criminal groups have steadily increased in a climate of impunity, leading to heightened self-censorship by the profession as a whole as well as the murders of more than 60 journalists over the past 10 years. During 2010, the nature of drug gangs’ control over the news agenda expanded from prohibitory censorship to concerted attempts to place propaganda or press releases in selected media outlets. This was typically achieved through a combination of threats and bribery. In Honduras, political conditions stabilized somewhat in 2010 following a coup in 2009, and some legal and constitutional protections for press freedom that had been suspended the previous year were reinstated. However, journalists’ ability to work safely was severely compromised by a sharp rise in harassment and attacks in early 2010, including the killing of six journalists in March alone. The aggression and intimidation came from both sides of the political divide. This increase in violence, coupled with a climate of impunity in which journalists’ deaths were not investigated thoroughly or in a timely manner, pushed Honduras’s score from 59 to 61, placing it just inside the Not Free bracket.

Following a series of declines in recent years, Ecuador and Bolivia experienced significant downgrades in 2010. Ecuador’s score fell five points, from 47 to 52, to reflect an increasingly polarized media environment and a rise in negative rhetoric and actions against news outlets by the administration of President Rafael Correa. Pressures on the media included a growing number of criminal defamation suits, raids and shutdowns of broadcast outlets, government advertising boycotts, and official attempts to influence the news agenda through the establishment of state-owned or controlled outlets. Meanwhile, Bolivia’s score moved from 43 to 46 due to the approval of several new laws that allow the government to impose fines, withdraw operating licenses, and imprison journalists under loosely defined criteria. The legislation led to an increase in self-censorship by journalists. More modest declines were registered in Argentina as a result of continued tensions between the government and oppositionist news outlets. Journalists faced increased attacks and harassment, and there were officially sanctioned attempts to restrict the production and the distribution of newspapers, particularly those associated with the Clarín media group.
The only significant positive numerical movement in the Americas for 2010 took place in Colombia, whose score improved from 60 to 56 due to progress in ending impunity for past attacks on journalists. Charges were filed in a number of cold cases, and previously closed investigations were reopened.

In addition to assessing recent proposals by Gov. Luis G. Fortuno for addressing the island’s underfunding of its retirement system, Moody’s said it also will look at his proposed budget to determine if it moves the island closer to structural balance and if it believes revenue and expense forecasts are reasonable.

Hugo Chavez hosted ousted Honduran president Mel Zelaya at the presidential residence in Caracas. The report (link in Spanish, if you use this translation, please credit me and link to this post) reads,

The purpose of the meeting is normalizing relations with Honduras. According to the President {Chavez], Zelaya and [current Honduran President Pepe] Lobo have reached an agreement which will be formalized in a document.

Earlier last week Chavez had officially recognized Lobo as the legitimate President of Honduras. Clearly, there are deals in the making.